Quote:
Originally posted by ic13:
There was a rather interesting documentary on PBS last night that dealt with a number of issues relevant to the WWI sim. It was called "Warlpane:from airplane to air force." Its part of a four part series. I highly recommend watching it if they re-run it. Its also available on DVD. The most interesting part dealt with the rotary engines. According to the documentary, the Sopwith Camel was so light, and the spinning gnome rotary engine generated so much gyroscopic precession that to fly it you had to "think ninety degrees ahead." Basically, the gyroscopic precession would deflect any applied force ninety degrees in the direction of the rotation of the spinning crank case. The engine would appear to be spinning clockwise as seen from the pilot's seat, so if the pilot attempted to bank to the right, for example, the plane would actually enter a dive as a result of the deflected force. If he banked left, the plane would climb. If he attempted to climb, it would bank right and if he attempted to dive he would actually turn left. The pilots of the time amazingly learned to anticipate all this strange behaviour and mastered flying these highly torqued machines by "thinking ninety degrees ahead."

It sounds like quite a challenge but it would certainly add to the realism of the new sim if the gyroscopic precession were heavily modelled in some of the new planes. It may make most of us turn to those planes that had in-line engines but it would be pretty cool to attempt to master the art of flying the way they had to in WWI.
There's a video linked somewhere in this thread of Peter Jacksons camel flying in NZ. Its great to watch, the Camel really looks incredibly difficult to just fly never mind fight in. Warming up on the ground the massive torque and gyro forces are so evident, every time the pilot blips the on/off throttle (no real throttle control, all or nothing) the thing looks like its trying hard to roll over. In the air there's a constant on/off/on/off of the throttle every second or so, it doesn't look fun to fly at all, how you'd keep in formation for instance baffles me.

It'll be interesting to see how GT model these sort of quirks. Sat in front of a PC monitor with no physical feedback I don't see how you could try to manage those sort of forces. There's a great danger that they'd just appear to be random.

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